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Everything posted by Outlooker

  1. I happened upon this picture; note that it is rather large at 3.4 MB. But there is a lot detail, if you look closely you will find many nice little things.
  2. A website with a quick glance at the data: http://www.climatedata.info/forcing/gases/carbon-dioxide/ Here the c(CO2) of the past: I see a pattern here comparable to that of plastics-pollution of the oceans: Almost all of it stems from China and India, while Western populations are led to believe/feel the West is the leading polluter, using this lie then as a pretext to necessitate higher taxes (and bans of plastics, like the ridiculous plastic straw ban in California, which does nothing but soothe "liberal minds" and adds costs to Western consumers): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/ https://www.verdict.co.uk/yangtze-river-plastic-pollution/ Western countries pollute negligibly, because we recycle, use landfills, and ecologically safe garbage-incineration plants. Again: I'm also all for keeping the environment as clean and healthy as feasible, but I prefer effective and efficient measures, not propaganda frauds that are just pretexts to redistribute income and wealth.
  3. Here, have a quote from one of the experts at the core of the issue:
  4. This man is a legend, and one of the "Super Jews" I learned much from. Clarity of thought combined with depth of explanation. Sorry, I messed this up; this video (5 minutes short) is about Wealth redistribution
  5. I think that should be of interest to some some of you: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies That's China's effort. Most of you probably know about the already public US' efforts due to traitor's info-leaks, but it's related information so I'll post it, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/nsa-ant-catalog/ https://www.eff.org/files/2014/01/06/20131230-appelbaum-nsa_ant_catalog.pdf So far for software security patches for trying to get some measure of security. EDIT: Suddenly after release of the article all parties deny that anything anywhere anyhow happened. Going back to business is probably more profitable than causing a public mess... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-amazon-apple-supermicro-and-beijing-respond
  6. May I suggest two different kinds of keyhole-based reconnaissance? The naked-eye-peeking-through version seems already established and is nicely quaint - a keyhole-shaped shroud - and useful enough. But there could easily be a more advanced version for a more professional thief based on an advanced tool, something like a periscope - after all, DM's steam punk elements already have a lot of tech, including a looking glass/scope; the more advanced tool would be a short thin tube with a mirror shard on its one end, and a lens on the other. The tube would be used on the door, put through the keyhole, and then a more or less freely rotatable camera view could simulate the looking through the tube and perceiving the situation on the other side of the door from the perspective of the tube's end. This method would have the advantage of making able to see not only what is straightly behind the door, but also (by rotating the "tube/mirror") what is right next to and even above and under the door. If my description is not clear enough, I mean a steam-punk version of something like this: Technically like a Thief 2 scouting orb a bit behind the door on elevation of the key hole.
  7. I'm bringing this thread up because I happened on a piece of information I think is highly relevant and instructive regarding Sotha's OP question about survival preparedness; it appears to be valuable advice on what to expect during civilizational breakdown based on genuine experience from the breakdown of the UdSSR/Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. The picture is somewhat large, so I put it in here: Further, climate change may not be all that terrible, after all - at least the rising CO2 concentration has lead to a global growth spurt of trees: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth https://psmag.com/environment/the-planet-now-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago And while this is not directly connected to the issue discussed, this little video still is somewhat associated and more reason for optimism; it shows a solar-powered agricultural robot that automatically picks or individually sprays weeds in a field, greatly saving on herbicides compared to whole-field spraying: https://twitter.com/danieljpeter/status/1042398755495075843
  8. A Hungarian firm specializing in digital 3D reconstructions of historical buildings and landscapes. Lots of images of old Hungarian castles and chateaus with many details and design ideas based on real historic examples. http://pazirik.hu/en/
  9. Because it seems to me many here do not question the honesty of the scientific process, just let me add a study I happened to come about just today: More: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/23/health/obesity-malaysia-nestle.html https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3472.full https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/07/18/629575118/medicaid-under-the-influence-how-drugmakers-sway-medication-options-for-patients Beware those scientific studies -- most are wrong, researcher warns https://www.yahoo.com/news/beware-those-scientific-studies-most-wrong-researcher-warns-164336076.html Hidden conflicts in FDA drug approvals? pharma $ to FDA advisors – before and after advisory meetings that recommended drug approvals. “Pay-later conflicts of interest” have gone largely unnoticed & entirely unpoliced. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6397/16 FDA repays drug industry by rushing risky meds to market As pharma companies underwrite three-fourths of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s budget for scientific reviews, the agency is increasingly fast-tracking expensive drugs with significant side effects and unproven health benefits. http://www.foxnews.com/health/2018/07/01/fda-repays-drug-industry-by-rushing-risky-meds-to-market.html https://idmprogram.com/scientific-opinions-for-sale/ And on and on it goes, endlessly. Many scientists have become prostitutes, just like journalists, and therefore the once-noble institution of science has become a cesspool of falsehoods.
  10. It's not quite that simple. Chances that scientists report fabricated or misleading findings rise with the economic and political impact of their subject of study. Fraud and misleading studies are less likely in scientific fields of "hard science", in which any other scientists easily and quickly can attempt to confirm or disconfirm a finding just by trying to recreate an experiment. Conversely, cheating and fraud can be expected to happen in fields where the exact recreation of an experiment is impossible (e.g. medicine, when it is impossible to redo the exact same experimental setting with the same kind of patients) or too difficult/expensive. And there is no shortage of already exposed academic fraud and systematic problems in the scientific process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish This leads to p-hacking (deliberately choosing experimental results so that they support a finding), or just slicing up a finding into multiple studies, so that the publication list of a scientist is longer and he looks more productive and important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair This is probably known generally already, just as an reminder than most of "social science" is not science, but a political cult (exploited by socialists/Marxists) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis In many fields of science, especially social science (including psychology), but also medicine and climate science, attempts to recreate old experiments lead to zero-effect findings or even opposite results. This proves that many scientists in the past produced false or even fraudulent science. https://twitter.com/RetractionWatch This is an somewhat regularly updated thread of some findings that failed replication. https://twitter.com/realpeerreview This is an account that exposes outright fake science (gender studies etc.), which openly abuses the reputation of science as a means to reveal truth for political machinations. Science has the reputation from past successes that it produces magical results - and truth. This reputation is exploited presently to further economic and political ends of interested parties by abusing science and scientists to provide public justifications for political measures or to sell economic products - at least some scientists have become prostitutes than can be simply bought. Therefore, science as a human activity can not any longer be generally trusted. Additionally, much that carries with it the dignity of being "science" is outright comical garbage, because it was abused for political and ideological ends, example pictures above.
  11. This is true already and has been for a long time. Humans end up in the earth or being converted into ash; most of their bodily matter is released into soil and groundwater, as well as the air. If you cremate a human body (which should today be the most common means of getting rid of, quite literally, human waste) 90% or so of it is released into the air as CO2 and water. Both substances are taken up by plants to produce nutrients, which animals and humans eat. Estimating the degree of distribution of such ex-human bodily matter in the air, we are all currently breathing in or eating up quite a lot of matter that once were people. So, humans turn to food all the time, and we are all eating them regularly. And we breath them in, even if we are not living directly downwind of a crematorium. If anyone is interested: I can also prove that humans are manipulated by radio wave emitter antennas that control human behavior, practically globally. And tin foil hats won't offer protection!
  12. I also think that I would be prone for severe depression if I would perceive the world without values, selflessness, friendship, justice, morals, and all the other good stuff that makes life worth living. So, looks like we live in different worlds and that's fine. I'll prefer my side of thinking as it seems to me more... beautiful. Doesn't this mean that you perceive reality through a filter, so you see a prettified illusion instead of reality? I am not sure what the benefit would be in obtaining even more cynical and cruel perception of the same world. Not cynical. Precise, truthful. Attempting to recognize reality as it really is (which is difficult and probably impossible, because our senses and mental organs only evolved to get our genes better into the next generation; our brains are modeling computers, that construct a simplified internal model of the outside world - reality - and then use this model to make survival-enhancing predictions, that is, our brains are prediction machines; whenever something happened that we consciously or unconsciously did not correctly predict, we are surprised, or even shocked, and thereby motivated to attempt to update, correct our internal world model to enable better predictions. This seems true for things so diverse like one's own body movement, social interactions, or even stock market predictions, or looking for and trying to exploit business opportunities, or something so basic like trying to get sex. We try to make sense out of everything to better predict and therefore better obtain resources/survive/reproduce. The benefit I think I try to get out of this is to attempt to get a more realistic view of reality, "truth" if you want to call it that, just for the sake of it - perhaps my desire is just another evolved instinct to further survival and reproduction. I am certain I welcome unpleasurable truth over pleasurable illusion. I just hate to be cheated, even by my own mind, my own feelings, instincts, my own being. I want to know the truth, the "real" truth. I guess we get to choose our own interpretation of thw world we inhabit. But thanks again for the discussion, it is interesting to see different point of views. Yes, thank you, too. And I want to add that I am not sure I am right in anything, I might as well be mistaken, but I just want to attempt to understand reality; and much of it, explained by the "conventional" models and explanations makes just not really sense to me. There is too much conflicting information and hypocrisy, too much difference between what people say and preach and what they are actually doing.
  13. I just remembered this argument: Do you want to exist? Do you think it is "right" that you exist? Do you condemn rape or murder? If yes, if one of your ancestors raped and murdered to make you exist today, do you feel like you should not exist or even kill yourself for your moral convictions? If you think no, then what if somebody today murders and rapes to produce offspring in competition for reproduction with other humans? Should the resultant child be killed? Because, it is an "immorally" produced child? I conclude from this that only success matters, and all morals is just illusion, deception, self-deception, a propaganda and political tool. Morals always seem to work against the self-interest of at least one involved party. Perhaps the more naive, more stupid, or more slave-mentality-prone party. It's moral to boldly die and kill in war, but suicide due to chronic pain or murder for self-interest is forbidden. It's moral this or that, but all morality seems only to get the moral actor to get the brown end of the stick. As we are on a game-related forum, let me post a game-related quote; you may substitute "honor" for "morals":
  14. Than you will be glad soon. See, plastics and hydrocarbon fuels are made from fossil oil and gas and coal because it is cheapest currently; you can't beat just digging up coal and burn it or putting a pipe in the ground and having oil and gas flowing out freely economically. You need to discern the energetic and the elemental (atomic) requirements. For decades we have the technology to synthesize hydrocarbons from air - because C and O and H are there as CO2, O2, and water vapor H20. There are a great many of ways to do this, you may google methanol from air fuel from air For one concrete paper and method out of many, have this example: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.5b12354 Note that photosynthesis - the energetic and elemental basis for our current fossil fuels and food production - is already an evolved process to make "fuel from air". But human technology can do it, too. We are not doing it for energetic reasons: The processes are currently way less than 100% efficient; therefore, it makes no economic sense to burn the energy equivalent of, say, 100 kg coal or gas, to process air into the energetic equivalent (as fuel) of 20 kg of hydrocarbons (80% energy waste). There is obviously no reason to make 100 liter of oil from air using up the energy from 400 liters of fossil oil; of course, the fossil oil is used for energy or production of chemicals from directly. This, however, changes when we have abundant sources of non-fossil energy, so we can afford to "waste" energy to implement a fuel/plastic-from-air-fuel/plastic-back-into-air cycle. There are at least two major developments that may provide that energy abundance: Renewable energies, if they would become both cheaper and widespread, provide "free" energy from solar radiation, and indirectly from solar radiation through capture of wind and wave energy. The main hindrance to currently base our energy supply on this is the fact that we lack cheap ways to store that energy - energy supply must be stable, and wind, solar and wave energy is not providing energy as continuously as fossil fuels or nuclear plants. But if the energy were cheap enough, we could afford fuel-from-air technology as storage system for the energy from renewables even if the energy conversion efficiency is much lower than 100%. So, the electrical grid would connect all over the world wind, wave and solar renewable energy systems, and feed their electrical energy into fuel-from-air plants which produce hydrocarbons from air as a form to store energy. If that energy later is needed, we can use this "battery" by burning the fuel for electricity generation as we already do now with fossil fuels. Thus, the material cycle would be closed, the matter making up the fuel or air (or plastics or other chemicals made from it) would just cycle into and out of thin air. But renewables are currently still to expensive to qualify as "free" energy. This could change with the advent of nuclear fusion. Note that fusion already and for over half a century is technologically established: Thermonuclear bombs work well and release quite a lot of energy from hydrogen fusion, but it is a bit much too rapidly, so it's not usable as an energy source to keep civilization going. And we have fusors. You may want to google: fusor It's a nuclear fusion reactor. It works, it's fusion. It's old technology, and even some more gifted kids build then in their homes. You can today buy them or at least get ready-made kits to build them and order them by mail. The issue is that the fusion in them takes more energy input than comes back out from the fusion process. That issue is tried to overcome with the larger nuclear fusion research plants. If it goes like scientists hope, we get fusion with a net energy surplus, and cheaply. This would end all current and foreseeable energy shortages, as hydrogen is practically limitlessly available; in water, and if you want to think bigger, the gas planets are made out of it, so that should last us a while; thinking still more utopian, do not forget that stars are fusion reactors, and big balls of hydrogen. Actually, of course, we "eat" and live off fusion reactors since forever, because the matter we are made out of, the fossil fuel we currently use, and the whole ecosystem and organic matter generation is based on the energy received from our local big fusion reactor, the sun, mostly through photosynthesis: fusion-energy capture as sugars/biopolymers(cellulose etc.). You may eat a sausage or cookie and think not much of it, but you are actually consuming energy from a big fusion reactor that fuels your life. If it works out as hoped, we get practically "limitless and zero-cost" abundant energy. And then we can waste that energy, what we cannot do as easily with (limited-supply) fossil fuels. And then we can afford to use the already available fuel-from-air technology. Currently, cheap/free abundant energy from fusion is a huge political challenge: It would disrupt the economy and the geopolitical power order in many ways, for example oil-producing countries and companies would stop having something to sell, whole countries like Russia, that live off almost on energy(oil/gas) exports would stop having noteworthy incomes and fall into economic and political disarray, which you would not want with a nuclear-weapons superpower. So, oil/gas producers have an incentive to sabotage fusion research. Less commonly known is that the USA also depends for it's economic and geopolitical power on keeping up the need for oil and gas, as it is US policy to enforce all oil and gas worldwide to be traded in Dollars, or deviators get bombed or regime change - thus the USA enforce a steady demand for Dollars in global circulation and trade, which allows the US to create more money/Dollars than equals their real economic growth while spreading the inflationary costs from this to everybody else (who have to use Dollars as a currency for trade and as global reserve currency, and therefore must bear the inflationary devaluation of the Dollar, but not the USA itself). De Gaulle called this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege While I do not want to stray into explaining economics and geopolitical power based on it here, just let me give you a simplified idea how it works: The US prints up dollars, and forces everybody else to accept them as currency (by killing all people who sell oil/gas/minerals in other currency than Dollars). This creates 1. a constant demand of Dollars, keeping it's value up 2. a growing amount of Dollars in saving accounts (in the form of US government debt/bonds held by other countries). The advantage for the US is "free money" or "free stuff": Imagine the world sells the US "hamburgers" for 1$ per hamburger. In year one, the us may buy 1M$ in hamburgers, and pays them with printed-up (money/debt creation) 1M$. Now the US has 1M hamburgers, and the maker of the hamburger (say, Japan) have 1M$ in cash or us debt/bonds. Now the US creates more money, more dollars, than equals their real economic growth. Say, the US creates 2% more money per year (so called "inflation target"), causing the dollar fall in value just as much. You now can see that the US still has 1M hamburgers, the Japanese still 1M$(plus interest, but that is irrelevant as the real interest is lower than the inflation) - but because the Dollar has now less value, the Japanese could not any longer buy back all the 1M hamburgers they sold to the US with their 1M$ they got from the US as payment for them - in other words, the US got a lot of hamburgers for free from the Japanese! Now, the hamburger example is just for simple demonstration of the problem. Real sums are much larger, currently over 2000 billion$ imports p.a. for the US; if you assume an inflation of 2% of the dollar, every year the US gets around 50 billion dollar in imports "for free" - and their real debt falls in the same order. The net effect is a large advantage for the US - in just ten years they get 500 billion dollars for free in imports (if you take a aircraft battle group - carrier + fighter planes + submarines + destroyers to protect it at around 10 billion dollars in purchase cost, in ten years the rest of the world makes the US a "gift" of 50 aircraft carrier battle groups). So, the US has a vast interest at keeping the world dependent on oil+gas and the Dollar, at least for now or until another scheme is established that lets the US keep its "Exorbitant privilege": Therefore, there should exist powerful interests sabotaging both renewable as well as fusion energy research. But, as I pointed out above, "free and cheap" energy would not only be politically, but economically most disruptive: Ultimately, almost every resource is limited and has costs because of energy costs. If energy becomes free, everybody can afford a golden toilet. This, of course, would make a lot of people who are now rich (and powerful) suddenly poor, and therefore they, too, should resist such an energy development; world gold reserves became as valuable as iron bars are now, for example. Thus, the real powers in the world can be expected to shift their investments and holdings of value as well as the structures they rely on for political and military power and control, before they allow free abundant energy.
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